Knitting, designing, and musing my way through life.

Review–Noro Silk Garden Sock

Hello all! I’m still working at making the pdf for the socks, and hopefully it’ll be up soon. Other than a few small places, the only real difference between the two sizes that’ll be in it (size 9 and size 10 US) are what the center panel and along the sides. I’ll grab some decent photos as well of the socks.

In any case, today I’d like to post a review of Noro Silk Garden Sock. I’ve always heard good things about Noro, and while I’m enjoying using the yarn, I think it’d be helpful if some other people could stumble upon this–it’s mostly stuff I wish I had known going in.

First off, the colours are absolutely delicious. It knits up nice and thick (at least on my US 1s), and it’s warm as anything you’d ask. It may not feel quite what you’d expect on your hands, but on the legs and feet it feels cozy as can be.

The yarn is spun singles–it knits smoothly with little bias, so far as I can tell. Since I have a biased panel, however, it’s possible I just can’t see it yet. I’ll find out once I get to the foot, which won’t have the panel any longer.

What I really wish I had known prior to getting it was that it has so many slubs in it! While I’ve had few real problems with it, it’s annoying, and it makes getting a good gauge swatch harder. When I did my swatch, I only had one spot with a slub. Thinking that it was the odd one and not the norm, I didn’t take it into account. While this hasn’t ruined my knitting by any means–my gauge is still fairly close–the fact there are so many slubs (especially at colour changes) means I probably should have averaged that in.

With the picture below, you can see there’s two just in this short bit of length. The top ‘strand’ (I looped it that way on purpose) is about what the normal width is, while the bottomost has a huge slub, and the center has a much smaller one. Slubs are what I expect of buying handspun or using my own–I never expected to see them in this, and I’ve never found anywhere else online that mentions these in the silk garden sock yarn.

Even with the slubs though, I still think this is a great yarn and a pleasure to work with. If you can get a chance to knit with it, and you don’t mind the slubs, you’re going to have fun. The colour changes are perhaps my favourite part, and help accent the new design quite well in my opinion. I hope this ‘buyer beware’ is a bit useful for at least one person, so they aren’t quite as irritated by the slubs as I have been.